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Comments
The irony of this position is that I recently argued with someone else who had a similar opinion of the situation (to the point of trying to tell me that Russia has been justified in messing with Ukraine all this time, because eastern Ukraine is "not really Ukraine" in the sense that "real Ukrainians don't live there", as a way to get around this same person's usual principle of opposing interfering in other countries), and that same person has a strongly negative opinion of the US and a strongly positive opinion of mainland China.
International geopolitics be wild, yo.
I'm posting this story precisely because it got me to check I was not, in fact, browsing r/nottheonion.
(edit: Just came back from r/nottheonion. He's right there, sure enough, but I did indeed find about it somewhere else.)
Meanwhile, in the halls of Congress:
https://molleindustria.itch.io/democratic-socialism-simulator
This game has been in all three of the (not TTRPG-specific) big charity bundles (Racial Justice, Palestinian Aid, Ukraine). If your page doesn't say that you already own the game, check your bundle purchases.
I just played it.
I'm surprised I was able to maintain Dem majorities in congress for all of both terms, though I'm also pretty sure I shat the bed in my last half-term and will be followed up by a Republican president who proceeds to undo a bunch of the stuff I did.
> not free
Oh, FWIW, that game works basically by presenting a long series of binary questions plus some events that just happen (with no choice attached). You play as the President of the United States, and you pick anything from policy priorities (though some require more control of Congress to enact) to managing your image. And specifically I think you play as a POTUS elected as a Democrat, starting with a Democratic-majority Congress (but a Republican-majority Supreme Court, based on what one of the questions implies).
The first time I played I tried to usually go with things that tended to do what the game told me were goals -- increasing the people power meter and decreasing the climate impact meter. I also tried to take steps that would generally get me more increases in political support and budget. I did manage to get re-elected and keep control of Congress, even keeping a budget surplus for my first and maybe even second election cycles, but I ended up running a big deficit by my last half-term and there was probably a big economic crisis going on with one outlet complaining about "hyperinflation" (though that was Fox News, which in this game is literally represented by a fox, because animal for characters lol), and I saw that the simulated voters weren't very happy about it at the end.
I later ran the simulation a quarter of the way but instead attempted to simulate Donald Trump. I actually got to the first midterm elections with very strong popularity, amusingly, and even maxed out control of Congress somehow. That kinda surprised me. Though there were some publications saying that I betrayed a campaign promise and killed off Medicare for All or something like that (I made decisions pretty firmly against it). So who knows how long that popularity would have lasted.
That's also when I realized that I wasn't governing as a blank slate POTUS; I was specifically governing as a POTUS elected as a Democrat, and specifically having campaigned on a platform that approximates "democratic socialism" as the game understands it. Given the constraints of the design, I can't actually play as Donald Trump. So that might have contributed to how that played out. (Also I didn't go all the way with it yet, obviously. But also, my simulation of Donald Trump wasn't absolutely an antithesis either; it favored strongly protectionist measures on trade, for example.)
Also, the questions and events are different depending on what you do, and possibly also on RNG, but I'm not sure about the latter.
Posting without comment.
Spoiler:
Also, post-Soviet post-punk compilations are now war-themed again.
Woah.
Although the effect is significantly mitigated by awareness of what do folks post on Polish social media.
----
So, I mentioned I wanted to write a bit about the lefties' stance on the war in Ukraine. But having said that, I want to note I mean lefties. Not some generically bland liberal who just happens not to be a rabid rightie wacko, like Biden or whatever, and not necessarily even the left wing of the US Democrats, but mostly the kind of folks who openly call themselves socialists and so on and so forth. Mostly the opinion-making intellectuals.
It's like, these folks are so much anti-imperialist, that they aren't ready to condemn a war of imperial conquest if "the West" is siding with the victim, because if they condemned it, they would have to side with the Western imperialists. The nuances are kinda lost at them.
So, the lefties we have here - you know, here where the war is just off the border - are kinda chagrined, because their intellectual heroes kinda fail at this point.
(At this point I can make a digression that a very similar thing goes on with the Pope, who seems to have bought into his good-guy shtick too hard, just as they have into their leftie shtick. Replace local lefties with local Catholics and it's much the same. But I'm thinking the lefties are funnier to speak of.)
So, this is going to be a bit of a story about our lefties wrapping their heads around that. One leftie party already left some sort of pan-European organization of leftie parties because that organization failed to take a stance opposing the Russian invasion. Another, an influential leftie blogger, openly spoke of his disappointment with Western lefties. Meanwhile, my primary source is a leftie journalist/think-tank establishment that otherwise keeps posting a lot of weird stuff about socialism, feminism, veganism and the like.
One argument the local lefties raise is that the Western lefties are having a colonial mentality which makes them think that they can tell other peoples what is best for them over their own wishes. They call it "westsplaining". Irony much. Part of this argument is the accusation that American leftie intellectuals are just as much believers in American exceptionalism as righties, just inverted. America is exceptionally bad, sort of. Supposedly there are three strands of westsplaining: the Russia-understanders, the ivory-tower intellectuals, and the bleeding-heart pacifists.
Another is to call upon the examples of Marx, Rosa Luxembourg and all the lot of lefties from a century ago, and point out they were never bleeding-heart pacifists. Like, when you fap to a bloody revolution, you probably shouldn't make a sudden swerve when this time it's not your chosen foe who's the bad guy, and be like "stop defending yourselves, it'll only cause you hurt". That Marx and Engels would never say that, would no doubt side with Ukraine, and so on.
There's also the curious argument that NATO is actually a limit on American imperialism. That's a piece of sophistry I do admit I wouldn't have expected from a leftie.
The anti-imperialism-as-a-front-for-anti-US thing is super widespread, and not just in the US and western Europe. There's also that thing where they tell themselves that they'll "strategically support" in their anti-imperialist effort something they acknowledge as not-socialism, although I'd think an outright invasion would be a lot to convince yourself of.
'Zactly this thing, seems like. Our lefties, as far (as little) as I can say, are less keen on the anti-US thing than the average. They can go on and on about teh ebul americanz, but when it comes to that, they stop short of whitewashing the Russian regime. I think I only ever saw or heard of one case, at least in the context of the ongoing war, and that guy was clearly lone and bonkers.
Funnily enough, such whitewashing is the domain of a specific subset of the righties, roughly mapping to the US paleocons or libright. Apparently modern Russia appeals to their gaybashing/helidropping power fantasies.
"The People's Convoy" refers to a group of truckers who are trying to make a big stink (figuratively, and literally with vehicle exhaust) about COVID-19 vaccine mandates. They were in DC a little while ago; now they're in California.
...SOCIALIST. *dun dun dunnn*
How the Chinese see Biden:
I'm kinda familiar with the premise of this video. There's always some third-rate town that an important road happens to run through. The chief difference, I believe, is that these American images usually show a nice, wide, multi-lane road when the cases I think of have, like, one lane per direction of movement. I don't feel qualified to compare, so I can't really say much what would the author of the video say.
There's also an interesting nitpick. One day, I read a blog post by a guy bemoaning the road development that occured thanks to the euromonies. He was like, sure, now we have big nice roads linking the major cities, but he kinda longs for those times when stopping for a roadside snack meant a visit in some Whateverville, Nowhere that is now at a safe distance (and largely cut off) from traffic.
And kind of that time when I went to Czech Republic telling myself, it's a serious nation, with a serious language, I'm not gonna make fun of it, and the first thing I see is that Czech for "mixed waste" is almost letter-for-letter the same as Polish for "a funny piece of trash".
now that's just evil
On a lighter note, I was about to ask if you guys really do that stuff with gowns and these funny caps when you graduate from college. I might be mistaken, but all I've heard of that sort of stuff going around here, was PhDs on an old and established university. Kind of odd in comparison, but I guess that's tradition for you.